Estonian Ballroom Dance Championships of 2006, Mar 2006This year's ten dance champions (both latin and standard) were crowned
Comments:
Event - Estonian Ballroom Dance Championships of 2006. This year's ten dance champions (latin and standard combined) were crowned. I had always wanted to do this kind of event and finally an opportunity presented itself, when the championships took place in Tartu. This was a mammoth of a job. I took pictures for almost 12 hours straight, taking my finger off the shutter only to change CF cards, change lenses or to take a few breaks to eat. Unfortunately at one point I also had to go home for 45 minutes since my 60 GB HyperDrive suddenly started yelling that it had run out of space (apparently I had forgotten to make enough room on it before the event). When I finished, I had shot 20 000 pictures in 12 hours. From those 20 000 pictures I've selected 555 for the gallery - I hope you like them.
Photography - At first I experimented with my Sigma 55-200 F4-F5.6 combined with a flash, but the results weren't that hot. I had to crank up the ISO with this lens but still couldn't reach the minimum required shutters of around 1/500 needed for action because of the narrow minimum apertures. Plus the 580EX flash got depleted REAL FAST. I felt like I hadn't even begun shooting, when I already had to change batteries. Also the flash results looked bland and average, so I decided to ditch the Sigma zoom and the 580EX and go for available light pictures instead. This turned out to be a perfect job for my three primes - the fantastic Canon 50mm F1.8, the wide Sigma 30mm F1.4 and my new darling, the Canon 85mm F1.8. The 85mm F1.8 got the most use, seconded by the 50mm and 30mm primes for medium zoom and wide angle shots. Single shot AF mode proved quite hard to use, since I was shooting in continuous mode most of the time and naturally the dancers kept moving back and fourth and behind each other, so I had to switch autofocus to AI servo mode. As a result, focus was all over the place as expected, but I had no choice - in single shot AF I would have captured even less correctly focused frames. It kept going darker as the day was progressing, so lighting conditions deteriorated and colour balance moved to a point, where there could be correct balance at one spot on the dancefloor and completely off the scale at another (resulting in hideous green-yellowish skin tones). I know RAW would have helped here, but I have yet to master RAW properly, plus the way I was shooting (20 000 pics in 12 hours), neither the camera nor the storage space could probably have handled that in RAW. As a result, I have my very first BLACK and WHITE photo in the gallery. I don't really like black and white photography all that much - as you may have guessed if you've seen my galleries before. In fact I didn't have a single black and white photo out of the 11 000 pictures I have here until now. The only reason I converted one photo to black and white was because the colour balance was so completely off the wall that I simply couldn't get the skin tones to look normal no matter what I tried. I do have to admit though - I really like the photo now that it is in black and white. I can certainly appreciate what's so tempting about the "dark side" of shooting in or converting to black and white. But still, I prefer the tougher challenge of getting photos to look descent in colour. There is some great B&W photography out there, but way too often it is used for what I did - to create a false impression and illusion of "good photography", while in fact simply trying to hide mistakes.